Making it in Unreal: why Project Borealis left Half-Life’s engine behind

A bespectacled mute. The whoosh-beep of an HEV suit charging up. The trajectory of a headcrab. There’s no one thing you could name that makes a game feel like Half-Life. For the international team behind Project Borealis, the standalone fan take on Half-Life 2: Episode 3, it’s a combination of tiny technical details - from matching Gordon’s speed and jump height variables, to nailing the keyframe timing of a familiar animation, or adjusting shaders to better approximate those in Half-Life 2. “No one thing is the switch that turns on the HL2 juice,” they tell us. “But taken cumulatively these small things come together to get us somewhere close.” You might think that an obvious shortcut to capturing the feel of Half-Life would be to make Project Borealis as a mod. The series has boasted one of the busiest and most successful modding communities in PC gaming history, spawning the likes of Natural Selection and The Stanley Parable. Yet the Borealis team have opted to build atop of Unreal Engine 4 instead.